Jamaica Pete and the carnival ride

Posted on 29 March 2022 by admin

The metal wheels rumble and shudder up the steep incline, the safety bar pressing hard against your gut. Tension, anticipation rise in your gut, mixed uncomfortably with the last four shots of Old Forester you had at the bar.

Yet another dream. The fifth? sixth? twentieth time this week? Numbers have accepted their nebulous, abstract attribute. Or maybe it’s the booze.

Yeah, probably the bourbon. Hard to argue against that one.

This one starts, as all do, in media res. The townspeople to either side of you mere ants, hundreds or maybe thousands of feet below, scuttling back and forth. The sounds of laughter and enjoyment drift up and up and up, filling your senses on their ways to the ears of angels. The air is thick, almost choked, with the smells of pasture grass and spun sugar and fried anything-you-can-imagine.

Carnivals are to food what Rule 34 is to kink.

Off in the distance, there is the neon of a Ferris Wheel, strings of lights marking walkways from one tent to the next, barely notable flickers of lit cigarettes and cell-phone screens. Above, the stars shine brilliantly in a moonless, cloudless sky, seemingly close enough to touch, if you squint just so.

Or, again — probably the bourbon.

You always hated roller coasters, because if the worst-case scenarios that fill your mind didn’t get you, you were too busy fixated on the impending comedown to enjoy the high (practicing the end before the start, song lyrics echoing in your brain).

“Not dis time, t’ough, hey?” Jamaica Pete, reading your mind, strapped in tight next you (although how he’s safely locked in, as scrawny as his frame is, is a mystery for the ages).

Not dis time, indeed. Sitting at the front of the line of cars, you can see that the apex of the track is only seconds away. And right on cue, here come those worst-case horror scenes: derailment, faulty safety equipment, a lone toddler that has been placed onto the tracks by his junkie parent (hey, weirder shit happens).

And it hits: you’re fucking terrified. Bowel-emptyingly, reconsidering your stance on religion terrified. But that’s what makes this ride so worthwhile — without the fear, where’s the fun? No risk, no reward.

“If’n ya really want t’ play it safe, go ride the teacups wit’ th’ fuckin’ kiddies.” Damn it, he’s as right as he is high.

And you realize that you’re in the now, in this seat with a bar crushing your beleaguered liver and centrifugal forces threatening to shower anyone unlucky enough to be seated behind you with pre-processed bourbon. When the ride ends, you can deal with that then — burn that bridge when you cross it. Maybe they’ll let you ride again and again and again until this dream ends, and maybe this is the one dream you never have to wake up from.

But for now, touch a star over your left shoulder for good luck, swallow hard so you didn’t waste that bar tab, and enjoy the fall, ’cause it’s happening now, here, and you’re just along for the ride at this point.

Jamaica Pete and the dreamcatcher

Posted on 28 March 2022 by admin

Another dream, and you’re there, along with Jamaica Pete. A street festival, some small town in the South, but here the fire-and-brimstone preachers dance through the streets with ladies of the evening, string ties and glasses and fishnet hose doing some sort of offshoot of the Can Can to the tune of Camptown Races on banjo and splintered guitar. Men and women and children line the streets in a pulsating mass, screaming and smiling, excited but not pushing dangerously.

Yet.

You sense it, though, the adrenaline rush that starts riots. It’s strongest in the eyes of the young, but those flames dance madly in the eyes of every person here.

“‘Ey, mon,” and you can’t help but roll your eyes and grin at the white man with dreadlocks and a filthy daishiki. “‘Ey, look – sometings comin.” Gary Oldman was much more convincing.

But you follow his skeletal finger, trace the path from a yellowed and chipped fingernail through the ballroom ministers and their Babylon whores, past the clowns with their running colors and beyond the all-Negro marching band, almost to the horizon, and you see it.

You see her.

The distance is playing tricks, tendrils of fog coming up off the dirt road the parade travels. There’s a silence pushing through the bluegrass ragtime banjo and horns, like a Klieg light shining through a pinhole. Her dirty redblonde hair blows in a wind that exists only for her. Her eyes, green as absinthe, and the rest of the world around her starts to desaturate, leaving the dreamworld of Oz.

There’s only enough color in the world for her. Only enough music for her. Only enough air for her.

Only enough you.

You’re suddenly and violently aware that you’re about to be trampled under foot by the oncoming parade, squashed like a grape by redneck clowns and dancing Baptists, and you grab for Jamaica Pete to head for higher ground. Pete shrugs, pencil arms amazingly strong, and you suddenly realize that, just like him, the crowd has stopped, the hookers have stopped, the band has stopped. No one moves, not an inch, good ol’ Walt Disney would be amazed and jealous at the suspended animation. Everyone in the world, everyone in this world, locked and trapped in her beauty.

Like flies in amber. Like dinosaurs in tar.

And she’s right on top of you, fifteen yards, then ten, then five. And she never stops smiling, never stops looking directly at you, until she’s nose-to-nose with you. Her skin smells like vanilla, her breath like fresh strawberries, her hair like lavender. Her dress, silk and translucent red, brushes against you in her breeze, caressing your arm. You open your mouth to say something, say anything, but her finger, gently as a lover, presses against your lips, the heat of a million stars just at the edge of your tongue.

“Shh.” One syllable, a thousand seconds of aural bliss. And you hear her voice, echoing and distorting and whispering and shifting phase, singing to you an eternity of chords in undiscovered tones, her lips never moving, never twitching, never breaking that beautiful smile that captures and immobilizes. The happiness on her lips is multiplied in her eyes, and you feel yourself drowning in a sticky hallucination that burns your throat and blurs your world.

“We all unfold as we should.”

And then you are awake, back in your quarantined hotel room, condemned walls barely covering condemned wiring and condemned pipes, you on a mattress that puts fire hazards to shame. Your left arm heavy and tingling, pinned beneath your head, your shoulder pinching the sensation away from it’s inferiors.

“Welcome back, mon.”

Does that bastard bathe in Patchouli or something?

(re)awakening

Posted on 9 March 2022 by admin

Vacation. Mid-winter February, another city somewhere in America. The world is dull, muted. Colors are dirty faded versions of themselves. Sounds are distant and staticky. Touch is like being separated from the world by a thin wool body suit, taste is bland no matter how much spice is added.

Nothing feels like it should. Maybe memory lies, or romanticizes the past. The only thing that feels real, the only spark of life is brought by negative — anger, sadness, nostalgia. All of which quickly spiral out of control too often to a sense of hopelessness, nihilism, some sort of Nietzschean cage.

On a whim, a text is sent. Questionable purpose, maybe none at all, outside of seeking connection. And another is received, and poetry is shared, and suddenly things start to make some sense — a vague, shapeless, probably imagined sense, but enough so that it feels like a lifeline, or maybe a voice calling out from safety.

A memory:

A crossword puzzle, appropriate for ages 8-14 probably. A picture of galaxies and star clusters and other astronomical bodies set against starry black, probably meant to inspire said pre-teens to learn more about the heavens. The end picture was likely cartoonish, or clearly hand-painted. But it stuck, and eventually became a dream dreamt twice through a life: once the night after completing the puzzle, and once more. The dream was set at night, though you had to just know in your bones that it was night, because it was bright out, the entire globe of the sky filled from one horizon to the other with the puzzle image — galaxies, supernovae, moons, planets, comets — so close that they seem palable if it were actually advisable to touch, say, a red giant or the heart of Andromeda.

*It’s close, but honestly, no image can capture that dream*

That dream was broken by a new day, begun with the strangest mix of raw elation and crushing sorrow, of having been touched by something uniquely beautiful that will never come one’s way again. But the memory, as they say, remains.

Home, current day. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel, only it’s not. Because the dream recurred, as vivid and hyperreal and tactile as memory served. Only on waking, the sense of once-in-a-lifetime enjoyment is lessened. Because the dream returned, for a second and maybe not the last time. Because the waking world is more like remembered from long ago.

Where only weeks before was the cinema of the ’40s, the album quality of the ’50s, the food quality of those horrible ads for Jello and ham and black olive casseroles of the 1970s magazines aimed at lonely housewives chained to their husbands’ bidding — now, here, rich and glorious color in high-definition 8K at 60 frames per second on an IMAX screen, full bullet-time surround sound with a sub-woofer that rattles one’s very soul. The air has that quality of the immediately-post-rain wonder: clean, clear, as though the gods had just finished their weekly washing chores, colors brighter than anyone can remember, that springtime petrichor freeing the mind of everything but the here, the now.

It doesn’t matter so much where we are, as much as: we’re not in Kansas anymore.

She is…

Posted on 7 March 2022 by admin

She is hygge.
She is the X on the lonely adventurer’s forbidden treasure map.
She is petrichor after a long summer’s drought, evanescent.
She is fernweh – Scotland, Ireland, rural Japan, places with history I can’t comprehend.
She is paradox: the complexity of simplicity, the awe-inspiring simplicity of the deeply complex.
She is the unexpected delivery of a single stargazer lily, from a secret admirer.
She is lagom.
She is serendipity.
She is a radiant smile cast freely into the world, resplendent, incandescent, lighting all, eradicating shadows, adding extra hue to everything it touches.
She is saudade.
She is aliferous, threatening to bring me to close to the sun.
She is reverie.
She is ataraxia.
She is rarity, a curio, arcane, selcouth, impossibly unique.
She is aware.
She is apricity, and Elysian, catharsis.
She is kalon.
She is a zephyr when no shade is to be found, psithurism in autumn.
She is frisson.
She is mamihlapinatapei.
She is stardust, stellar, too enormous in depth and breadth to fully comprehend but entrancing nonetheless.
She is a mermaid, singing, each to each, and I think she will sing to me.

A Return to Hope (Captured)

Posted on 23 February 2022 by admin

How long has it been?, he asks himself silently. And he honestly doesn’t know — time has stretched and compressed and warped so much that the ten years his math tells him could be a day or a century. How long since I didn’t feel like a machine, like an emotionless computer processing 0s and 1s and not much more?

The rain blows against the window at his head, soft chit repeating at irregular intervals as the wind shifts. A cat paces back and forth at the foot of the mattress, whining quietly that his usual spot is not easily accessible. There’s the familiar whir and occasional puff of cool from the tower fan to his left. There’s a smell of clean shampoo, fruit-scented? and WONDERFUL, and the weight of her right arm across his chest, firm but light as an autumn ocean breeze. Cool, soft, alien but so familiar from his wandering daydreams. Her hand on his shoulder, touching the tattoo, her fingernails occasionally digging as she dreams of whatever beautiful aliens dream of.

The past years, he had suspected he was slipping away from himself. There were moments of his old and familiar self, but fewer and further between as the decade had progressed. Hobbies had fallen to the side, passion projects had run out of steam, and inspiration had been muted, barely a whisper in the fog of his nights. The one constant had remained working with computers — solving problems with a tool that did what and only exactly what you told it to do. Little wonder, then. Easier to think in 0s and 1s than admit you’ve gotten too lazy and tired to keep up with the people around you. It’s admonishment that echoes in his head routinely, motivation mistaken consistently for self-deprecation. Easier to bury your feelings than admit people don’t seem to understand or care.

Her forehead is pressed gently against his cheek, her bare abdomen and hips solidly against his. He listens to her breathing softly, and is convinced for a moment that this is all a dream, nothing more than a dream, a passing jumble of neural signals he’ll forget with the dawn. I need a camera, he thinks. A full range view of this room, this moment, this beautiful human beside me. And the talent to use it, to capture this, that it’s not forgotten and lost in the shadows of my brain. He feels her leg crooked over his, soft and cool and so comforting, feels her gentle breath on his neck, smells the slight undertones of bourbon and cigarette.

He takes in the details, every one, from her head to her toes and back, again and again. Repeats what he sees, hears, smells, feels, more granularly with each pass. Draws an image, carves a tableau, ingrains the essence of a three-dimensional holograms, over and over and over until the moment is as real inside as out.

And smiles. Not in binary, not with the purpose of solving a problem, not with concern for tomorrow or yesterday, but at peace and in the moment, words and sensations his own camera.

One Life, and how to remember it, ideally…

Posted on 27 January 2021 by admin

(This was originally written in March of 2011, and I had a brief moment of panic when I couldn’t find it in any of my storage places for my writing. I’m not generally super happy with most of what I write, but this was an exception. Thanks to M for being able to find it a decade later, and passing it on to me.)

I think and talk a lot about the soundtrack to our lives. Some people live life in a silent film, to stretch this metaphor; they never listen to music, or they consider it a nuisance, or (worst) are apathetic about it. I’m on the other end of the spectrum – there’s something constantly being piped out of whatever speakers or headphones that are most convenient. If I had had a say in the matter, there would have been an entrance theme playing in the hospital delivery room back (sometimes I think Puccini’s Nessun Dorma, from Turandot; too many have suggested O Fortuna). If I have a say in the matter, I’ll get to pick my exit music, as well

I did not know you
Our lives never touched
‘Til the day they gathered
To bid you farewell
And they painted your picture
And as I looked around
I felt I saw you
In the words and the sound

They called her Nana. In fact, it wasn’t until about thirty minutes ago that I ever knew her actual given name; I had to text my girlfriend to find that out. But then, that’s what you do with grandmothers, right? The first-born grandchild mispronounces the word grandmother, and that nickname sticks forever. It did with me, though I’m still not certain how my lack of speech impediments managed to turn “grandma” into “Merv.”

I never met Nana, as a matter of miles. She was in Boston, after moving here in the middle of last century from Scotland. I did talk to her once, briefly, on the phone, and eavesdropped on a few phone conversations thanks to the iPhone’s speaker. My girlfriend would call her on holidays, and ask her to tell one of her many jokes; she would let me listen in, and her brogue always made me smile, no matter what the punchline was.

Your talent came flowing
Through the stories they tell
And through the the faces
Of those who loved you so well
Your life gave them a treasure
A piece of themselves
Something to carry
And still serves them well

There are a lot of songs about loss. As much as I don’t pay attention to lyrics, a lot of those songs are rubbish for me, because they’re too morose, or focus too much on the end of things. Not that that’s bad, or unnatural — I think our tendency as humans is to give in to grief. There’s a lot to be said for the comfort to be found in a blanket of sorrow.

But when it comes to people, to a human life and all that comes with it, I think it’s really important to push past that, as much as possible. Instead of dwelling on the loss, focus on the memories of the good, the things that impacted us as people, as friends and family and, sometimes, strangers.

I don’t know the full story behind Brian May’s Just One Life like I do with some other songs, but I kind of like it that way. To me, it’s the perfect song for today. It’s a poignantly sung lyric, a beautiful melody with a perfect arrangement, and if I tried for a million lifetimes, I couldn’t put the sentiment into words half as well as he did.

Perhaps inside you
You were messed up like me
But them you were whole and strong
And friend in their need
And what you left behind you
And what swept over me
Says that your life’s work
Rolls on and on
A piece of eternity

The exactness of this story is questionable, and the details aren’t important:

There’s a hospital room in Boston, and there are lots of relatives keeping watch over Nana as she sleeps peacefully. One of the relatives has brought in a portable CD player a few days earlier, and my girlfriend suggests in the early afternoon that they play some music (one of the hospice workers had suggested that even though she was sleeping, she might hear what was happening in the room around her). Her brother mentioned her favorite CD, and so they put the disc in and hit play, and as the first notes of her favorite music began to fill the room, she took her final breath, and moved on to whatever you want to believe happens next.

And through all the mixed feelings that flooded my head when I was being told this story, as the words rode the airwaves and bounced off of satellites and crossed the hundreds of miles between Birmingham and Boston, as memories of my own grandmothers bounced around like pinballs, one thought was constant: Nana was a lucky woman. With all the craziness in the world today, out of all the possibilities, she got to pass from this world sleeping peacefully, surrounded by people that loved her and listening to her favorite music. If I can save all my good karma and choose how to spend it, I think I’d like to cash it in on exactly that.

Rest peacefully, Nana. Your spirit carries on.

Just one life
That is born, and is, and is gone
Just one life
And I’m so glad to know you
As I know you
Brian May, Just One Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb2c2RaUKy4

These were the best of times
I’ll miss these days
Your spirit lit my life each day
My heart is bleeding bad
But I’ll be okay
Your spirit guides my life each day
Dream Theater, The Best of Times

For Susan McGregor (1922-2011)

Not rules as much as just the way it goes…

Posted on 16 January 2020 by admin

It always starts with an image.

Maybe it hasn’t always been this way, but it always is now. An image so clear yet dreamlike and unsharable, at least by his hands – never good at drawing, painting, sculpting, or even capturing with cameras, but his brain overflows with visions astonishingly beautiful and horrific.

And so sometimes those images attach themselves to music, something random piping through his earbuds. Heavy, ethereal, cinematic in its own right, whatever. There’s no rhyme or reason to the process, that he can understand. It just happens — music sees imagined vision from across the crowded bar, and after a few shots of liquid courage, music hits on vision and they get married and live together happily ever after.

This, then, is the source. Like an album full of songs that are crafted solely to support a single riff or short chord progression, the stories and characters and dialogue flow entirely as an excuse to describe a lone image that he can not otherwise share with the world.

That’s the sad secret, one which he shares begrudgingly but also suspects is not his alone.

Solitude Notwithstanding (Apologies to S. Vega)

Posted on 27 April 2017 by admin

“I don’t want to be lonely
I just want to be alone…”
-silverchair, ‘across the night’

For his second wish, Steven chose to give the genie freedom.

It felt momentarily surreal, using a wish to provide the giver with something equally powerful, but also right. Why shouldn’t he, having been given the present of solitude through a wish, not show his gratitude by reflecting that gift on a being who was imprisoned, chained to him through a fairy-tale curse?

Not to mention that Steven wasn’t really sure what else he could want, that wouldn’t have the dreaded cataclysmic kick-back effect.

And so he wished for the genie what he had wished for himself, and the genie thanked him, and disappeared, a fog that gradually faded from view, leaving Steven unable to say with certainty that the genie had ever been there.

Although of course it wasn’t imagination or dream; his first wish had been been granted, and he still had the weirdly disconcerting bottle on his shelf, the genie’s discarded prison left behind as a constant reminder.

—

Solitude, Steven was coming to realize, was a one-way mirror, and your enjoyment of it depended entirely on which side you stood, and what you wanted out of it.

On the one side, self-reflection was all that you found. Yourself staring back at you, with everything that lay behind you as well. Pleasant for the narcissist in yourself, probably.

On the other side, you can watch as the world goes by, crawling day by day through its paces. It’s a real-time reality TV show, without the scripting and the editing for reaction shots. So much so, as it happens, that watching it is all the interaction you have.

But that mirror, he thinks, has its flaws, those areas where light is refracted and bent, making you look warped. There are smalls slivers of glass missing, and those places make the worldview hard to enjoy.

And after a while, when you’re the only one left, who else is going to clean the glass but you?

—

He had almost missed out on his chance to live a fairytale altogether. It almost seemed to him, on reflection, that the genie wanted to be found. The bottle was attractive, certainly, but not the usual thing that would catch his eye. Not to say non-descript or ugly — more that he was past the point in his life at which he looked for treasures, hidden or obvious.

Simple was enough for him, but after passing it a few times with his eyes, he was eventually drawn enough to it to pick it up, and out came the genie. End of story. Or beginning, as such things happen.

Steven had long dreamed of something special, something unique happening to him, so when it happened, he had thought himself ready, incorrectly. It took a ridiculously long time to make his first wish, though he quickly followed that with his second, almost as though the two were intertwined.

He had a fear of consequence, of reactions unforeseen. That was the way of the fairytales he knew – penned by Serling and Joyce and King, where the wish is granted, and enjoyed, until ultimately revealing the universe’s desire for balance. He worried that wishing for world peace would end in overpopulation, that riches for himself would deprive another of everything they had ever known, that any of his desires would be met with something inversely undesirable.

In time, after careful consideration and thought, he asked for and was granted the same thing he gave (in a way) to the genie – freedom, which in his case meant solitude.

—

“Time can erase not just the future, but also the past.”
-penn jillette

—

Steven was very bad at many things, but he was very good at discovering that. He wasn’t bad at everything, by any means, but many things that he thought he wanted to do quickly revealed themselves as out of his reach, for varying reasons. He wanted to play sports, but his body wasn’t built for physical competition; he wanted to act, but was far better at exploring himself than understanding not-him people. But he tried, over and over – that, he was very good at.

He tried relationships, but was never very good at them. He tried being part of groups with similar interests or hobbies, but quickly grew exhausted. Teams asked too much of him; friendships, over time, would change and drift away. Even being a hermit didn’t work out, but in time, he finally sorted it out – he liked being around people in a distant way that didn’t ask or expect too much from him. It was far from what he had dreamed of – just like his films and his chess playing and his woodworking abilities – but he accepted it, because Vonnegut once wrote “So it goes,” and he liked the simple poetry in those three syllables.

And so he wished for a world in which that was okay, and granted the being with the power to give him everything he had could ever wish for, anything he could ever want, the freedom to chase the same, or whatever else the genie might want for itself.

—

In time, Steven grew to learn the consequences of his wish, and they were everything he had expected. He was happier without having to make commitments to others, or having to account for their wants or desires. He was sad many nights, without someone meaningful to share his thoughts and experiences and feelings with. He did what he wanted, whenever and wherever he wanted, without explaining himself to anyone for any reason. But he did everything alone.

He did everything lonely, which was fine, because that’s what it was.

—

One day, Steven decided that he needed a change. For no discernible reason — no one incident changed things for him, no overnight dream of different things or sudden light bulb that things might be better, waiting on him somewhere else. It was just time.

He had forgotten that there was one more wish waiting for him, but he had never forgotten the genie. They had spent so much time together without the expectation or hope of what would come out of their relationship, and he had grown to love the genie, without ever realizing it, without naming it. Theirs was a preternatural closeness and understanding, and though details of the genie’s face and voice had begun to fade into a glamorized imagination of a memory, his love for the genie’s company remained crystal clear in his heart and his head.

And so he set out, with only the most important of physical possessions, leaving everything he had ever known behind. He didn’t know how to find the genie — not even how to begin — but he knew that it was worth trying, worth the look.

Because with the genie, he had found someone with whom he could be alone without ever being lonely.

He didn’t need another wish — just the determination and opportunity to really make his first wish come true.

“You got your solitude
And I got my peace
And nothing in that moment matters more
If only in just this one fragment together it grows
This tree… may be i must maybe lost
Right where i need to be…”
-steven wilson

12/19-12/24 2015

The Great Return of the Untitled

Posted on 11 April 2006 by admin

Laying on his roof over the front patio, the sounds of the city night are distant whispers. He stares up into the night sky, thinking, wondering, dreaming.

All about her.

The way her skin feels beneath his fingers echoes through his mind, bouncing madly off of the walls of his skull, tracing narrow arcs of blue flame where they travel. Her scent, the way the smell of her clings to his clothes and his cheek where she pressed against him. The look in her eyes, piercing his soul to let the sound of her laughter in.

He dreams of things he has no business dreaming: of walks so calm that the rest of the world is washed away in the deafening silence, and of the sound of the ocean crashing around them as they laugh together. Of summer nights in front of a flickering screen, hours on end, of music shared loudly, of winter nights curled together, sharing warmth and comfort. He dreams of pulling the stars and sky from above, and boxing them into a pendant that she can carry around her neck forever.

But he is only human, and dreams and desires come as they will to him, outside of his control. And he smiles to himself, suddenly feeling the urge to stand, to climb to the highest point on his roof, to shout to the world and the stars and the gods that he has known her all his life, that she has waited for him all of hers, and that no matter what else, they have found each other.

He does not stand, or climb, or shout, but only lays there, dreaming his dreams, smiling, imagining her there next to him, working out the logistics of capturing the stars and the sky for her.

It can be no more improbable, he thinks, than his hope of grasping the feelings inside of him and showing the world that dreams exist outside of the sleeping world.

By any other name… (untitled no. 58)

Posted on 21 February 2006 by admin

The plank above the door reads “geisteskrank.”

This is not where he meant to be. That much he knows. The darkness seems to shift around him, shadows lifting and falling like waves before a storm. A hissing noise, not so much mechanical as the sound of a machine breathing, voices in the fan above him. There’s a small window in the door to his right, the door under the sign, a porthole, and he can see the dried blood smudged across it on his side, four lines that taper into nothing, left to right. The answer is just beyond that glass, but he’s too scared to see what may or may not be. And so he sits, propped against a wall of wooden crates that he somehow knows rises taller than the ceiling, shifting his hands and hips in the dark muck that may or may not be blood, may or may not be his own blood, wondering what to do next.

geisteskrank.

The scuttering to his left startles him, whipcrack of a head turning, and he thinks he hears himself ask who is there, but there’s no echo from the steel walls around him, nothing but the dry beating noises of a rundown engine from somewhere in the distance. And so he shifts again, the ashy sand sifting through his fingers, so dry, he left wondering if there is any water left anywhere in the world.

The bay window under the sign to his right, a large crack running it’s length, a river travelling north to south. Beyond the glass, a brilliant blue reflection of calm waters and a still beach. He sees her, walking alone, exactly as he will always remember her. Her shoulder-length hair bobs gently with each step, swinging alongside her cheeks and the sunglasses that cover the shadowy pools of near-black. He smiles as she moves, gliding across the white sands without a care, taking in the day and leaving a little behind for everyone else to enjoy.

He calls her name, and she doesn’t hear, or doesn’t respond. He knows that it is time for him to rise, to follow, to go after what he wants. He starts to rise, and feels the floor beneath him shift. The wall of crates is no longer behind him, but on all sides, wavering and groaning, the weight of impossibly tall wooden mountains trying to speak to him. He hesitates, breathing heavy and pupils constricting; she’s suddenly so far away, moving like a sheet of tissue caught in a light breeze, so slow but so far away. Between them, in the space where there was sand and ocean and beautiful summer day, there is a black grass that may be summer in shadow of an elm, or perhaps something else, something living and waiting for him to run across. The air shimmers, heatpulse rising to the sky. The sign above the archway is now blank, a wooden plank that says nothing but for him to remember what he knows, what he has learned, what he wants.

“Geisteskrank,” says a voice to his right. He turns, and there in the sunset light is a face that he hadn’t expected ever to see again.

“I didn’t sneeze,” he says. “I’ve got to be going, though. It’s time, right?”

“You’ll never be sure. That’s the best part. Oh, geisteskrank.”

“I didn’t -” and his denial is interrupted by a sneeze. The world turns blinding white, then fades to black, just like all good movies do.

Dairy of a Madman

Moooo.

Category Archives: Pinned Writings